Hi all. I think it's been about 7 years since I fell off the face of the earth here and after recently digging my M100 out of my basement and giving it some R&R in an attempt to shoehorn it into some aspect of my modern workflow I felt a twinge of nostalgia and was amazed at how active this community still is.
But some thanks are in order. To Ken and Steve especially, but also to the whole group here who put up with my 15 year old socially inept homeschooled self making a general ass of myself 10 years ago. Your collective kindness and patience (so much patience) is in no small part responsible for my current life and career here in Wichita. I believe I fell off of the vintage computer hobby after my junior year of highschool (the first year I'd gone to a public school after being raised homeschooled) and my mental health took a nosedive. Graduated by the skin of my teeth and floundered through a year of state university before dropping out to drift aimlessly for a while working as a car mechanic. Cars became my main hobby at that point, and I quickly realized the entire industry was a septic tank of horrible people top-to-bottom and quickly got out to get back to what I was good at: computer things. Ended up at a small datacenter run by one dude with the task of keeping the lights turned on while the company could sell off its assets (as many as possible) and cease operations. It was a crash course in Linux server admin, IP telephony, wireless multipoint networking, and managing multiple buildings entire IT infrastructure here in downtown Wichita. Eventually it closed and I've worked at a few MSPs here in Wichita honing my people-skills and developing my knowledge of Microsoft-based infrastructure, cloud tech, etc. It's been fun. In the interim I moved out, got married, lived barely paycheck-to-paycheck in a trap house in the rough part of town, got a small fixer-upper in the... less rough part of town? No kids; a few pets. Simple stuff. Kept the automotive thing as a hobby and realized that a good mechanic and a good IT guy have very similar skillsets, just different occupational hazards. A couple years ago I started a vlog-style YouTube channel at the urging of some friends given my hilariously poor luck with cars and the potential entertainment value. That has since been monetized to an extent that allowed my hobby (with an extreme amount of work; two 10-20 minute videos per week for the last year and a half) to more or less pay for itself and afforded me opportunities I could never do otherwise (there are some 4-6 other automotive youtubers here in Wichita with substantial followings; I'm the smallest). To keep this somewhat on topic: I tried searching the archive but couldn't find keywords with the right amount of specificity; did the keyboard switch on the M100 change at any point? The keyboard on my 1983 model is significantly different than my 1984 model. The 1983s keyboard sadly has multiple bad keys (I'm assuming the broken trace issue I've seen mentioned in a few threads during my research) so I swapped over the keyboard from my '84 model and it feels... mushy. I did notice they have different numbers on the PCB and the newer model PCB is a completely different color than the older model PCB is. My thought is perhaps someone put some damping o-rings or rubber bands around the keys but I haven't been able to find my keycap removal tool to verify. Thanks, Jake
